January 2008
38 posts
Beautiful Code
I’d hesitated to buy Beautiful Code for a while, but finally went ahead and included it in an order I placed for some other books. I received the book today and have barely cracked the cover open, and I’m already glad to have this addition to the library.
I’ve only read as far as Brian Kernighan’s essay on Rob Pike’s regular expression matcher, and I’m...
“If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass...”
– Security vs. Privacy
Pure Pwnage Season 2 →
Pure Pwnage has a second season? And they’re already several episodes in to it?!? Why does nobody tell me these things?
Usability Disaster Story →
An unintentional design choice (made by wiki software) leads 95% of people downloading Mono to accidentally select a 2 year old release of the software.
“Feeling unfocused (because like an idiot I was sleeping three hours a night) I...”
– Sleeping Is Giving In
Why Bembo Sucks →
Great piece. While I’d known that metal fonts were cut with subtle (but important) differences at different sizes, I hadn’t before thought of it as a factor in considering the use of classic verses modern faces in digital typography.
Control →
Normally I don’t find slideshow presentations to be all that useful, but I’d flag this “+1 Insightful”.
“Most calculus students might think that if one could compute indefinite...”
– Mathematica and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
“The thing that disrupts you is always uglier and worse in some way. Less...”
– Database gods bitch about mapreduce (sounds like the makings of a technology treadmill to me. Linux and MySQL are great examples, too: MySQL is steadily getting more expensive to maintain, and have you seen the size of the Linux kernel source recently?)
“Wheeler says the problem stems from Apple’s slot-loading drives. “It...”
– Mail DVD sparks “brisk trade” at repair shop (seems that if Apple sold me a “DVD” drive that doesn’t conform to DVD standards, they should pay for the fix when a conformant DVD breaks it)
Bring bad design to justice →
I want to buy stickers of this.
“Paul Irish suggests setting up your site’s onload handlers in a single external...”
– Automate firing of onload events (a good idea. I hadn’t thought of handling it this way before)
“After controlling for various factors (age, obesity, smoking, other ailments and...”
– Living in Fear and Paying a High Cost in Heart Risk. Allow me to translate: fear of terrorism kills more people than terrorism itself does.
Taxi 07: Roads Forward →
Beautifully designed (and informative) book about the New York City taxi system. Download the PDF and view with facing pages displayed full screen.
xkcd - Bass →
WANT HAVE!
Ushahidi.com - Kenya's Post Election →
Definitely one of the most useful mashups I’ve seen. Ushahidi.com lets people post reports of violence in Kenya, which are then posted on a map with details and photos of the event. The site serves both to inform people and to help NGOs coordinate their efforts. Nice work!
“So my pet theory is that if you want to make a lasting impression, then you need...”
– Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter—Steve Yegge
“So if you’re looking for evidence that graphic design has the potential to...”
– Will the Real Ernst Bettler Please Stand Up?
Apple Rolodex
I’m surprised that Apple didn’t include a Cover Flow view for the Address Book in Leopard. It’d be the rolodex for the 21st century!
GreenRiver.org →
Our company launched a new website tonight. Check it out! And thanks to everyone who helped.
Iris is not a vegetarian →
Tumblr doesn’t let you include a less-than sign or greater-than sign in your posts, due to the funky way that they double-encode/double-decode markup. You can either get it right in your published tumble log, or in the XML you get from the API, but not both. And if you try to edit said post after creating it, you’re screwed (i.e. you can’t reliably round-trip text through the...
“Rails should ship with an ironic default 503 which tries to debunk the can’t...”
– Ana Nelson
Autotesting Javascript in Rails →
Very nice, and just in time, too, as I’ve got a Javascript-intensive app coming up soon.
Pure Pwnage Season 2 →
Season 2 has begun! How could I have missed this?
New Gig →
Damien Katz now has a full time day job working on CouchDB, courtesy of IBM. Sweet!
War on Terror Over in the UK →
+1
Good Old Stuff Sucks →
“NewsGator’s online feed reader syncs all the feeds and their groups, across Macs...”
– NetNewsWire: Just What You Wanted—wow, this could finally free me from Google Reader
“Yet, compared to some of the fucks in the Rails community I’m like Jesus and...”
– Rails Is A Ghetto (Zed Shaw rants)
Verify SSH host key?
You’ll need the fingerprint: $ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
